The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  “I wasn’t going to sever you from your life, sweet pea.”

  Rosalie smiles. “My savior.”

  “What about your children?”

  “They are my own business,” says Rosalie. “And yes, I will sit them down and tell them. And I’ll start at the beginning. How we met. Our first time. All our first times, until the last times.”

  “Have you invited them yet?”

  “Not yet. Soon.”

  After Passover, the San Miguel Torah study group recites an English translation of the Song of Songs. When they come to the last verse Harvey turns to Rosalie and asks why the lovers are always running on the mountain of spices, and why the book is filled with so much unrequited love. Rosalie shrugs.

  “I once loved to look for interpretations, Harvey. I could unravel meaning out of a pie crust if I wanted to. But no more. You met me too late.”

  The children have been summoned. Rosalie phoned each of them and explained the details of her diagnosis and how she feels mostly okay, and not to worry because she treasures her life in Mexico and has everything she wants. Charlie, Philip, and Maya fly to Mexico City together and rent a car from the airport. A sudden rainstorm delays their nighttime arrival until dawn and Rosalie spends the evening anticipating and dreading their visit. She wants to tell them everything. She wants to talk about Lenny, about Sol, and most of all, she wants to tell them about Walter. And after everything is hashed over, revealed, and reviewed, Rosalie wants to top it all off with a coda: a little astonishment for each child—dream beyond your marriage—just as her father once gave to her.

  As she waits for their arrival, she imagines them in their rented car: Charlie examining a map, squinting because he won’t buy the reading glasses he desperately needs. Philip, driving through the rain, rubbing his sleeve against the windshield because even if the car has a dehumidifier he won’t know how to turn it on. And Maya in the backseat, taking in the sights of a country she has never seen, forcing her eyes open even when she is too tired to stay awake.

  Years back, when she was alone in the house, Rosalie would sometimes wrap herself in Sol’s tallit. She would pull it over her head, drape it on her shoulders, carefully fold the sides, and then immediately yank it off. The white wool was heavy and dank with her husband’s dried sweat, and the black stripes against her skin felt to her like bars of a cage. When Rosalie turned seventy Maya gave her a royal blue tallit made of diaphanous silk. She wears it around her casa and loves how the shade of blue matches Liberace’s plume and reminds her of Walter’s studio. In the predawn hours before her children arrive Rosalie sits on the floor of her bathroom, rubs her bare feet on the blue tiles, lights a joint, and wraps the tallit around her shoulders.

  For every telling there is a story, a narrator, and a listener. Rosalie can sum up the story in a single word—Walter. And just as she would read a K’tonton story to them when they were small, she would tell them this one. She would begin simply, with a refugee who followed a man wearing a brown felt hat. But does the story really begin with Walter? What about Sonia who was murdered? Maybe the story begins on the day Sonia and Walter set eyes on each other in Berlin. They were so young! It all began with their first kiss. Or it began the first time she kissed Sol. Or the first time her parents kissed each other, or their parents, or their grandparents, or theirs. Trace any love story back to its origins and you will find yourself in the Garden of Eden itself.

  Living far away in Mexico Rosalie spends hours considering the tributaries of choices that flowed from a single river. If Sol. If Walter. If her father. When Maya was small she would say feewee instead of if, and so Rosalie thinks feewee Sol or feewee Walter, feewee a mango or feewee a peach. All those choices, all those details swimming back to her in a refracted jumble of time. So much is in order and yet so much is confused. The other day she ordered dessert in a restaurant and said to the waiter, “Apple cake and flan, please. My mother and I like to share something sweet.” She had no idea what she had said until the waiter asked Rosalie if her mother needed a menu.

  And who would listen to her story anyway? Why would her grown children want to know of her love for Walter, and what would it mean to them after all these years? Her children have lives of their own, their own tributaries of impossible choices. Why ask them to gather the discarded threads of a previous generation? Sol had introduced Maya to Walter, and she briefly encountered a stranger who seemed to have no consequence in her sweet life. When Rosalie reached into her pocketbook to give her the silver bracelet, she thought, Let her know this matters, let her know this will one day hold meaning, let her know, somehow, of him. And then she handed Maya the bracelet as if it were a random dollar bill, a candy bar, a tube of lipstick. Here. This will look nice with the dress.

  Charlie and Philip, of course, don’t seem remotely interested in imagining the underside of her life. To them, she would always be the mother of the original Kerem boys, the woman who raised them, then shouldered impossible grief, and when they were just about grown up, she held a baby girl in her arms and said, Meet your sister.

  But Maya is another story. In the deepest part of herself, maybe she knows about Walter. Even if Rosalie leaves out the details once again, Maya will find a way to live between the dual cracks of uncertainty and truth, just as she had. Rosalie lights another joint and lays her head on the cool blue tiles of her bathroom floor. She allows herself to think of nothing for a while, nothing at all.

  Charlie and Philip enter first and embrace Rosalie in their big arms. She has forgotten that her sons have grey in their hair, that their bodies have grown paunchy with age. Charlie brushes tears from his eyes and Philip holds Rosalie’s arm as if she is frail. Maya takes Rosalie’s face in her hands and stares into her mother’s eyes. Rosalie wonders if her daughter learned this gesture in rabbinical school, where they teach pastoral skills just as they once taught the intricacies of Talmudic thought. After drinking a cup of tea, Maya softens. She rests her head on Rosalie’s shoulder and plays with her mother’s fingers as she did as a child, only now she measures her mother’s fingers against her memory of how they were once not so frail.

  Maya insists on serving breakfast. She finds her way around her mother’s kitchen, notices how Rosalie stores her teacups and mugs on a low shelf just like she did in the Briar Wood house. The same pots and pans. Here is her mother’s favorite whisk and carrot peeler, ensconced in this new drawer. We have to convince her to come home for treatment, Philip had said in the car. She can’t be so sick, said Charlie. Just be in the moment with her, Maya said to her brothers. Both of you. Maya whisks the eggs and wipes tears from her eyes. Such a bullshit rabbi, dispensing wisdom about being in the fucking moment. This is impossible.

  Maya tosses the eggs into a skillet and scrambles them. One day soon, she thinks, my mother will be gone and I will long to recover this time. This kitchen, these eggs, these plates, my brothers yammering away about nothing important. She slices mango and lays the uneven pieces on a plate, places fresh rolls in a basket, and gathers the food onto a tray.

  Words fly all morning. Charlie and Philip pass around the latest photos of their children: Charlie’s son Sivan, named for Sol (Don’t you think he looks more and more like Abba? Look at this one from the preschool play; he’s a miniature Rabbi Kerem!), Philip’s adopted stepdaughter Kayla (Look, Mom, she drew this picture for you!) The children offer summaries that are already familiar to her: Charlie has a job as a public defender, Philip teaches high school history, Maya needs to find work but she doesn’t want a pulpit job and she is off and on with her wilderness rabbi. Their words alternate in a stream of loud and soft syllables, humming like chords in a great symphony. And then Charlie says, Remember how Lenny wrestled us to the ground and how Abba gave those unbearable sermons when we were small and won’t you come home, Mom, just for awhile, or better yet, let’s go to Hawaii together, we can schedule a time that works for all of us. Philip—see what you can find online, I heard about some specials. Oh, what a fabu
lous idea, don’t you think, Mom?

  Rosalie follows the sequence of their words, alights on some details, and lets others slip through. She is weary now—too much weed and too little sleep. They have turned out decently, she thinks. Charlie and Philip are kind; Maya is radiant. Despite it all, she passed down the generational gift and kept the story alive. This fact fills her with solace. The pleasure she feels as her children surround her is enough for now, more than she could ever want. In their company Rosalie forgets that there may have been something more she had intended to say. Charlie’s, Philip’s, and Maya’s voices fill the rooms of her casa and she bursts with joy. Everything she wanted to give her children has been received; everything she had intended to say is already known.

  AWE AND WONDER

  May 2003

  Maya opens her eyes in the chilly tent before dawn. She and Jase are in Fahnstock State Park on a Wednesday morning, testing out an overnight retreat program that Jase calls The Wonderful and Wild Weekday Shabbat. She rests her cheek on Jase’s back, sniffs the curls that cascade down his neck, basks in his radiant warmth. So sweet, she thinks. Leave it to Jase to suggest a weeknight camping trip because he dreamt of waking up in a field of morning dew.

  Jase reaches for her hand. He is wide awake, beaming his flashlight on the last pages of Heschel’s Man Is Not Alone. Maya wraps her arms around his torso.

  “A little awe and wonder before breakfast?”

  “It’s always time for awe and wonder.”

  Maya smiles. “How could anyone become a rabbi without a little Heschel in his book bag?”

  “It’s great stuff. The deepest of the deep.” He closes the book and pulls her close.

  “Talk to me,” she says.

  “About what?”

  “Give me something fun to chew on. A line of poetry. Or make up a she’elah and I’ll answer with a teshuvah. It can be about anything; it can be about sex! I speak the same language as you, Rabbi Jase! Different school, same books, same crazy-holy-weird thing that most of the world won’t ever understand. So give me your best.”

  “That I can do.” He cradles her hip.

  “With words, sweetie.”

  He begins to hum a wordless Hasidic melody.

  “I’m not in the mood for a niggun,” she says. “Not when I want to have a conversation. Why on earth did you become a rabbi if you don’t love to talk?”

  Maya ruffles Jase’s hair. How did she land the least intellectual rabbi of her generation? They met at a Jewish food conference, flirted over lentil soup and torn chunks of spelt challah, cracked jokes about eating cholent cooked with organically grown meat. After the other guests retired to their rooms, she and Jase strolled the perimeter of a mountain lake, kissed in the faint glow of tea lights scattered around a bench. If her father knew Jase, he would be incredulous; he would have wanted Maya to find a mate who could be a true chavrusa, a co-traveler in the galaxy of texts. A chavrusa like his. A strange man full of surprises. The barefoot man in the apartment. Someone like that. Where had their flights taken them, and why was her Jase so flat, so sweet, so unstrange and so unsurprising?

  “We should study together,” she says. “I’ll help you out. When we get back to New York, okay?”

  Jase kisses her, rubs his hand down the length of her torso, circles, hovers. Why does she even care that he can’t talk philosophy? What use are all those words anyway? He is so good to her, his touch so perfect: not strange, not surprising, yet always just right.

  “You spoil me,” she says.

  “I intend to.”

  “What time is it? Shit. I’ll miss the Mourner’s Kaddish.”

  “We can still make it, Maya. I ran MapQuest and there’s a shul about ten miles from here.”

  “Never mind. I can miss it for once.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I’ll be mourning my mother all my life. And she wouldn’t want me to leave your toasty sleeping bag to find a shul where I could race through the Mourner’s Kaddish, which has nothing to do with her anyway.” Maya laughs.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “My mother wouldn’t have cared if I recited Kaddish.”

  “But it matters to you. We can make it in time.”

  Maya shakes her head. “I’ll meditate instead. A good sit in the woods to honor her memory.” She smiles.

  “So we’re staying.”

  “Yes. For now.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.” He kisses her belly, dives his face between her thighs.

  Is this what Rosalie would have wanted for her? Maya wishes she could meet her mother at a nearby diner for breakfast, share a plate of pancakes, tell her how her wilderness rabbi is excellent in bed but she’s just not sure she wants him on the other side of her Shabbat table when she is forty and fifty and sixty, the two of them dissecting the flavors of the latest artisinal kosher cheeses at the farmer’s market.

  Be careful, Maya, her mother would have said. Listen to your heart.

  She begins to cry.

  “Maya?”

  “It’s too much for me now. I can’t—”

  “But last night—”

  “We were stoned last night, Jase. And it was great. With you it’s always great. Unconditionally. I just don’t know—”

  “It’s okay.”

  Jase turns, clutches his book in his arms as if he is a small boy and Man Is Not Alone is his teddy bear.

  “Can we go now?”

  “You just said you wanted to stay, meditate in the woods. A gentle, mindful practice will center you—”

  “Of course it will, Jase. But I don’t want to get centered or be mindful or get in touch with my feelings or find my soul or travel the holy path to some sustainable future. I just want to go home. I want to check my email and call my brothers and think about my mother and sleep in my own bed.”

  Maya looks at Jase and takes in his stubble, his elegant nose, his gracious lips, the way he wants to absorb the words he reads without having to interpret them for himself. So earnest. So sincere. So wrong for her. She just buried her mother and he keeps asking if she can join him in Jerusalem when he begins his year-long fellowship in Jewish leadership. No, she says. Not yet. Maybe one day. Or maybe not.

  And Maya doesn’t know. She buried her mother only four months ago, back in Briar Wood, as Rosalie had specified. She stood in the cemetery, right next to her father’s grave, and delivered a eulogy that seemed so flawed and so sketchy, so distant from the way she understood her mother. After the service, a well-preserved Missy Samuels embraced Maya and thanked her for speaking so truthfully. “Your mother was my role model, my inspiration.” Bev leaned on her walker and wept. “The shul was my home,” she said. “Your parents made my life complete.” Maya and her brothers lingered at the graves and the three of them lay pebbles on top of Sol’s and Lenny’s headstones, and she stayed behind for an extra moment and kissed the headstones too.

  “It’s okay,” says Jase. “I get it.”

  Maya grabs a sweater and pants and rolls up their single sleeping bag.

  “Maybe you met me at the wrong time.”

  “After my year in Jerusalem we’ll see. Maybe that will be the right time.”

  “For what, Jase?”

  “We could live together. Or get married.”

  “I adore you, sweetie,” she says. “And I don’t want to marry anyone.”

  Jase packs up his clothes, his volume of Heschel, the banjo he is teaching himself to play. He takes out the embroidered bag that holds his tallit and tefillin, and steps outside the tent to face east. Maya leans on her elbow and peeks out, watching him drape his rainbow-striped tallit over his shoulders with surgical precision. He wraps the tefillin on his left arm, tight enough to leave indentations that will linger on his skin all morning. She stares at him as she once stared at her father when he davened. Just like Sol, Jase doesn’t need a prayer book because he knows the morning prayers by heart. He glances back at her and smiles, ju
st as her father smiled at her mother. You get me. You get this. We are in this together. Stay with me.

  She closes her eyes and imagines the house in Briar Wood when she was small, how her parents lived in separate universes in the big house—her father leaning over the Talmud, her mother whispering into the telephone—and came together at night to listen to their favorite records. Fly me to the moon. Dance me to the end of love. I say a little prayer for you. She would spy them from the doorway and smile at the sight of them, yet her parents seemed to live behind a veil. So much was inaccessible to her, just like she would always be inaccessible to Jase. He would assume that the crazy-holy-weird thing they shared would make them true soul mates, but it would only be an illusion. He would never understand the depths of her imagination, and in time their delicious, organic Shabbat meals would be tinged with sadness. He would sustain her with good sex for a while, and then she would feel alone.

  I’m a piece of work, Jase, she thinks. You deserve a sweet rabbi-loving girl, a hippie chick who wants to fuck you in mountain huts and whose brain does not careen into imaginative overdrive. A girl who will sit beside you at Jewish food conferences and laugh at your cholent jokes. A girl who won’t mind that you never talk about books, that you can’t play the she’elah-teshuvah game. Not a woman who wants to create something bigger than a rabbinate, more encompassing than a single marriage—whatever that might look like. It sounds like a recipe for being a lost soul, her mother would have said. Better you should stay with the sweet rabbi who pleases you in some way, at least for a while.

  They drive home in silence, listening to NPR and old Dylan CDs. When they pull up in front of her building, Maya hesitates.

  “I’ll call you,” she says. “Promise.”

  She lets herself into the apartment, hops into bed, and falls into a long dreamless sleep. When she wakes up the next afternoon she feels as if she has been hibernating for a year. She brushes her teeth and plays her messages: three from Jase and one from Madeline in San Miguel, insisting she come down to visit. All her life Maya had imagined Madeline as a tiny British elf who lived inside a telephone wire, accessible only to her mother. And now.